Media Release
September 25 2008
UniSA pilot named for the Vietnamese Friendship Award
UniSA
graduate, Vietnamese-Australian citizen and Australia’s first female
Vietnamese qualified pilot, Debra Tran has been nominated for the
special Friendship Award in the Vietnamese Graduates of Australia Club
Alumni Awards.
The Awards are the first initiative of the Vietnamese Graduates from Australia Club (VGAC) and have been established to highlight the success of Vietnamese graduates whose talents and skills enrich and benefit the community and show an ongoing contribution to the relationship between two countries in any field.
Debra Tran was born in Australia in 1986 into a family with fresh
memories of upheaval as refugees from war-torn Vietnam. The Tran family
settled in SA in 1982 in search of peace, freedom and a future for their
children.
Tran says every day she appreciates how fortunate she is to have been
born and raised in Australia.
“I understand how lucky I am to have had so many opportunities through education and the general freedom every person has in Australia to realise their dreams.”
And she has used her skills and talents to support others. Since she was 16 she has been a volunteer teacher of Vietnamese to primary school students at the Lac-Long and Dac-Lo Vietnamese Ethnic Schools.
“It is important to value where you are but also to remember where you came from, so I devote a lot of time to the next generation of Vietnamese-Australians, helping them to learn and maintain their Vietnamese cultural heritage and their language,” Tran says.
Her classes have steadily increased from 27 students in 2002 to more than 40 students this year.
Since graduating in December 2007, she has taken on full time work at a service station to support the hefty fees required to do the flying hours to secure her commercial pilot’s license and instrument rating.
And in what little spare time she has, Tran is training for her black-belt at the SA Vietnamese Chang-Moo-Kwan Taekwondo Academy where she doubles as a teacher encouraging people of all ages, gender and ethnicity to try taekwondo for physical fitness, self-defence, confidence, discipline and more importantly, honour and respect.
But next year she will be missed – Tran plans to move to Canberra to
join the Royal Australian Air Force.
Her ultimate goal is to become a fighter pilot so that she can play a
significant role in protecting the country she loves “for all the
freedom and opportunity it offers”.
You can vote for Debra at the Vietnamese Graduates from Australia website.